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NaPoWriMo 2013 #7

The Slave

My life is conquered by screens
Chaining me to my chair
Pulling me magnetically
As I sit and stare.

Bit by bit, byte by byte,
Second by second flows into the Sea
Of the time that gets away from me
And I don’t notice it, it flows so imperceptibly
Such is the might of my slavery.

Aren’t the most pitiful slaves
Those that don’t even know what they’ve become?
Filling their lungs with the artificial smell
That clouds their minds from the truth.

My body has contorted into a hunch
The kind of hunch that remains
My straight back now has a hump
Like The Hunchback of Notre Dame.

My body expands like an expanding balloon
Ever expanding, close to bursting
Yet not expanding so much as to not allow
For more expansion.

I am of the Digital Age
The Age of ones and zeros
Manifested on those glowing screens
As words and pictures
Enslaving millions more.

Gone is the society of Yesterday
Filled with the raucous laughter of company
Now the only laughter that emanates
Emanates from a digital screen.
LOL, ROFL, LMAO, HAHAHA.
If we can type our laughter,
What’s the need to speak at all?

They said the world became smaller,
And aye, that may be true
Especially when your world
Only consists of you.

And as Man reached for the Screens
His Ambition was lost in Space
And the Complacence that nestled in
Dawned the death of the Human Race.

For our attention has been whittled, chopped up
With the little pieces fed to the glow of the tyranny
That fills our life with fragile purpose
Of refreshing the page for something constantly
And relinquishing our privacy
For our secrets are not truly ours anymore,
We roll them into bottles and throw them remorselessly
Anything for a few Page Views.

Turn off your glowing screens for a minute
And throw the remote away.
Get off your ass, get out of the house
Talk a walk, breathe the air
Feel the sun, smell the people
Feel the sweat that trickles on your tongue
Feel the wind brush your neck
Hear the life with the sound uncontrolled
See the moon, that flecked white speck
Notice how peculiarly blue is that shade of the sky
It doesn’t make sense, and you didn’t notice that before
Be the pulse of the city as you run
Smashing into the hearts of a few
And feel the glory of your Life,
Coursing in through
Your body, that brilliant creation
Of Religion or Science or Artificial Insemination
Millions of things it does every nanosecond
Unseen to the eye, cause for celebration,
All the time.
But finally you must understand,
You were never chained to a screen
Only if you wanted to have been.